It Can Happen Anywhere
by Mickleditch
Summary: Gruber and Helga find shelter in a barn. This proves to be more fun than expected.


Disclaimer: 'Allo 'Allo and all characters belong to David Croft, Jeremy Lloyd, and the BBC.

Author's Notes: The 'Kommandeurwagen' was built primarily for the Wehrmacht by siting a VW body on a Kübelwagen chassis, creating a slightly odd-looking 4x4 Beetle.

* * *

There did not seem to be any livestock in the barn, which Helga at least felt reduced their chances of stepping into something. It did not look to have been used for anything except storage for some time; she could glimpse bales of some sort in the illumination of the flashlight, piled from floor to ceiling, all the way up to the very top of the roof where it was just barely possible to make out the shapes of rafters. She thought she could smell cut hay, although she really had not the faintest idea how hay ought to smell. The barn smelled like old apples and summer and like a real meadow. Always, Helga thought, the scents of fields and cows, or a sudden suggestion of Brie on the breath of a stranger, would remind her of France.

She started a little at the tentative cup of Gruber's hand around her elbow, urging her fully into the building. He turned to creak the stiff door closed again behind them, tucking the flashlight briefly under his arm as he did so. The beam danced erratically, flinging out shadows, showing bits of him at intervals.

"You are very muddy," Helga observed. "I told you that you should not try to push the car off the road."

"I did not want to leave it on the public highway in case the Resistance recognized our army number plates. The General is getting very cross about how many of his staff cars have been blown up lately."

"He will be very cross anyway when he finds out that you drove it for five miles knowing that it was overheating."

Gruber looked crestfallen. "I was hoping that I might be able to get us to the next village, but if the engine's fan belt is broken then I suspect that I have well and truly cooked it. I will have another look in the morning when it is light. If I cannot get it started and nobody has been sent out to search for us yet, we will have to walk the distance and request the use of a telephone."

"And what are we supposed to do until then?"

Gruber gestured to their interior. "This is the only shelter that we have, but I think that it will be quite cosy. I will let my uniform dry and try to brush the mud off later. It will not be the first time that I have slept in a barn."

"It will be the first that I have!" Helga looked upwards. A slice of twilight was visible through a half-rotten spot in the roof, but aside from that, the barn was very dark. The air was musty and still, the quietness broken only by the echo of their footsteps striking the wide planked floorboards, and the odd faint scratch; the furtive scuffle of a mouse or two. Or ten, perhaps. Or fifty. "We have no lights and no blankets. I do not intend to doss down like a peasant!"

"We will see what may be in here." Gruber took a step forward. Helga groped for his wrist, digging her nails into the skin.

"Don't you dare walk away with that flashlight!" she hissed.

He winced visibly, but did not attempt to detach her. "Come with me, then. You will have to watch where you are stepping. I am not used to soldiers wearing high heels, even when I was stationed in Berlin."

They walked behind the artificial light, half-feeling their way along the perimeter of the wall. The barn seemed to Helga to go a very long way back indeed, but after they had travelled another thirty feet or so, Gruber made a sudden interested noise and squatted down on his haunches. There was a slightly rusty paraffin lantern, obviously long forgotten by some French farmer, a little behind one of the stacks of hay. Paraffin sloshed from side to side in the tank when Gruber picked it up and shook it a little, but when he lifted the glass globe and reached in to examine the wick, it crumbled away to nothing.

"I think that we may have several hours worth of fuel in this."

"But what is the use if we cannot light it?"

"Wait - I have a solution." Gruber fished in the pocket of his trousers and brought out a handkerchief. Tearing two small strips from it, he wound them together, then opened the lantern again and pushed one end of the material into the well far enough down that it met the paraffin. Striking a match, he applied the tiny flame, and it flickered uncertainly for a moment before catching. The lantern spluttered into life.

"It will not last as long as a proper wick," he said, "but it will do."

It was easier to see around the barn in the orange glow, and the light made it feel vaguely more welcoming. The building was dark grey wood, shiny with age, and, far overhead, the ceiling was spotted with roofing nails and the mud buckets of abandoned swallows' nests. Gruber held the lantern up, illuminating a rough-sawn ladder.

"We could make use of the hayloft. It will be drier than down here on the floor, and warmer. Heat rises, you know."

Helga gazed upwards. "I do not think that I shall be getting up any heat in a pile of hay in a draughty barn. It is hardly a hotel," she added. It was, she thought, most certainly not the hotel that General von Klinkerhoffen had promised when he had requested her company for two days while he inspected the troops on a nearby training exercise.

She had expected long evenings of wine and music on intimate balconies perfumed with spring flowers, with, perhaps, if the General succeeded in wooing her sufficiently, a little hanky-panky in his room to follow. Instead, von Klinkerhoffen had run into a number of other top brass in town, and when he was not shouting and telling the men to shoot blanks at imaginary targets, he had spent most of the time whooping it up and drinking too much very expensive cognac to suitably appreciate even Helga's new black market negligee. To finish the sojourn off, he had then invited several of the officers back to Nouvion to observe his excellent relations with the locals, which meant that the General's Mercedes was packed with his cronies for the return trip and Lieutenant Gruber had been ordered to drive Helga back in the Volkswagen.

The Volkswagen which was currently sitting behind a hedge with a burnt-out engine while Helga spent the night in a barn.

She could not help feeling that she would have been better off passing the weekend with some nice quiet interrogation by Herr Flick.

"Go up. I will see what else I can find down here." Gruber set the lantern on the floor and moved away, leaving the ladder in a pool of light.

It was a steep incline, close to vertical, about fifteen feet in height. Helga gingerly touched the slats of wood that formed the rungs, then gave the whole thing a shake. When it seemed secure enough and left her with no excuse, she tucked up her skirt, and, disappointed that there was nobody to see, steeled herself and began to climb. She leaned in and hugged the ladder in the hope of keeping herself from slipping. Really, she should have taken her shoes off, but it was too late now to reconsider; climbing back down would be harder than continuing. She stopped at each step to steady herself and adjust her grip. The sides of the ladder thankfully extended higher than the hayloft floor, giving her something to cling on to while she clambered over the last bit.

To Helga's surprise, it did feel quite warm up there; a lot warmer, at least, than it had been outside. Having already noted the lack of a railing around the floor, she went forwards in the near-darkness with one hand outstretched in front of her. When it met abruptly with air, she backed away and moved towards the piles of hay instead. The fine dust she was disturbing got up her nose, into her hair, and into what felt like almost every other crevice it could find. She gathered together a few large bundles of hay and tried flattening them down into some sort of bed, but the result was not very appealing.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake," she muttered.

On her makeshift pallet, she tried to make herself comfortable in a manner that kept the straws away from her probably already laddered stockings. She wished wholeheartedly that Gruber would finish whatever he was doing so that he would at least come upstairs and bring the lantern with him. In fact, she was not altogether sorry that he was here at all. He might be a Nancy boy, but he was still a man, and she always missed being away from a man for very long; missed his smell, his sweet saltiness; missed the awareness of his stronger, harder body beside hers. Missed having it on top of her, and inside her, although there was not likely to be any risk of that tonight. She sighed. She had found General von Klinkerhoffen severely wanting, but still not as wanting as he had left her.

At length, there was a creak as the ancient crossbars protested Gruber's tread, and he appeared up the ladder. He dropped a coiled length of rope onto the hayloft floor, vanished again briefly, and then returned carrying the lantern in one hand and what looked like a tarpaulin over one shoulder. Helga stared at it.

"If you think that I intend to sleep under that, you will be thinking again."

"I felt that we ought both to have some privacy," Gruber offered, by way of explanation. Moving some stray hay aside with his foot, he set the lantern down again in the cleared area, and crossed the floor to stretch the rope between two of the upright beams next to the makeshift berth. He hung the tarpaulin over it, a little above head height.

"I seem to recall seeing that film before the war," Helga said, by way of note.

Gruber shrugged a little. "Well, I am willing to try whatever worked for Herr Gable and Fraulein Colbert."

"He did allow her to see him undress first."

"There are reasonable limits to everything." Gruber finished straightening the tarp, extremely carefully. Turning back to Helga, he tilted his head, looking over her attempt at bedmaking. "No, that is not quite right - you should pull plenty up around you. And make a little pillow, just like this. You must have it deep for your feet; it is cold feet that will keep you awake all night."

She watched him as he crawled around her, building up here and shallowing there until it grew more agreeable. She used her hands to assess how much would stick through her clothes. The stalks prickled a little, but overall it was not as bad as she had first imagined it might be. Nor was the barn itself; indeed, the small pool of light and the soft, springy hay beneath their feet were beginning to feel quite intimate. Helga imagined that farming peasants must enjoy a considerable amount of nooky in places like this.

She found her gaze following Gruber's backside in his officer's breeches as he bent and stretched. Had it always been so firm and round, she wondered? Had his uniform always fit his frame so well? His back looked acceptably muscled, and his tunic squared off his shoulders, in a rather misleading way, but one that was very attractive just the same. It was as though she had become suddenly and maddeningly _aware_ of him. The General would have been her preferred option, but, frankly, any handsome, ruthlessly efficient man in a position of authority would do.

"Most men would be planning how to take advantage of being alone up here with a private of the opposite sex. She would be forcefully ravished while she was utterly defenceless. But I suppose that I could not be that lucky."

"I could not describe you as living up to my expectations, either."

Helga quirked the corner of her mouth wryly. "Anyone would think that you had more fun in your last barn, Lieutenant."

"I do always try to look on the bright side of a hard situation."

"Was it during your youth between university and the army?"

"No, it was between Krakow and Kiev." After a moment, he added, somewhat apologetically, "My division were unfortunately forced to commandeer the use of a local farm for sleeping quarters."

"I do not suppose that you are going to give me any details?"

_"Helga."_

She tried to sound nonchalant, unconvinced of how well she was succeeding. "We have not got any better way to pass the time, and I do not rate my chances of getting very much sleep with hay stalks in my knickers."

"Oh, the ones with the little swastikas?"

"How do you also know what my knickers look like?"

"Word gets around in such a small town. And you are not very discreet when you hang them outside your window to dry."

"I am not sure whether I should be relieved about this or disappointed."

"You can go to sleep safely, Helga. I assure you that I have not the slightest interest in your knickers whether they are on or off." Gruber finished patting her pillow into shape. Rising to his feet, he retrieved the lantern and opened it to blow on the flame. When it proved too strong to be extinguished purely by that method, he spat on his thumb and fingertips and quickly pinched the wick out instead, and it smoked for the split second before the hayloft was plunged back into shadow. She listened to him retreating behind the tarp, and then to the drag and scrape of the hay bales for his own bed, and his boots dropping on the floor one after the other.

After a brief silence, it was replaced by the more private and graphic rustle and clump of him discarding his belt. She recognised sounds like that very well.

Then unfastening his tunic. Sliding the tight fitted shoulders down his arms.

Helga could feel herself biting her lip. She had not given this proper consideration at all. For the first time all weekend, she had a man stripping off not ten feet away from her, and it was a man with whom she was completely unable to do anything about it. As much as she wanted to.

She imagined his backside again, this time without his breeches. Focusing on what his outline might look like after those dropped to the floor sent her thoughts in quite a specific direction. She debated whether he would be small or large. Although she had never seen one of any size that she had not appreciated, her mind started to try to make the argument that seeing as it was wasted anyway, fate would probably be cruel enough to make him sufficiently endowed that she could have still been feeling him next week. A tangible ache began to grow in her. At times the war could be very unfair.

"Well?" she said. "Are you going to tell me about Kiev?"

"I do not know. You do have a tendency to gossip."

"What do you mean?"

"That what you hear will be round the women's barracks faster than a case of the clap after the paratroopers have been in town on leave."

"How dare you suggest such a thing," Helga said promptly, feeling both annoyed with him, and annoyed with herself for not wanting him any less because of it. "That only happened on one occasion, and I was not involved."

"Nonetheless -"

"Oh, very well, I swear! On my mother's life! I will not tell anybody. I am just intrigued. I do not know everything about what men can get up to, although it does not take a great leap of imagination."

"We are back to the paratroopers again," Gruber commented.

Listening to him undressing was like actually watching him. She could visualize his bare shoulders and back beneath his undershirt; the hard line of his spine. Helga could have sworn that she heard the precise moment when he began undoing the buttons of his breeches. The fact that he was doing this without the slightest thought for her made her even more aware of her own frustration. Coldness thrilled her, hidden passion writhing beneath the surface, but this utter disinterest in the face of her own passion was new; challenging. She was starting to wonder if she had ever been so aroused.

"Will you tell me, or not?"

She wasn't completely sure whether or not he would reply again, but at length, he did. "Naturally, our standard orders do not allow us to be out of uniform on active service, but it was a warm June night and very hot in the barn with so many bodies. It was necessary to strip down to the essentials."

"It sounds very exciting," murmured Helga. She tried to sound encouraging, but not so enthusiastic that he might become skittish and change his mind about the entire thing.

Gruber's voice dropped a half-octave. "There was not a little of that already. It is to do with the juddering inside the vehicles. It has a certain effect after a time."

"I am starting to see the Tank Corps in quite a different light. But does this not cause a problem when there are no women to be found?"

"Why would it be a problem?"

"You do not mean to tell me that every man in the Panzers is... indifferent?"

The hay crackled, accepting Gruber's weight as he shifted on it. "No, the majority of them still retain an unshakeable fascination with the female gender, though I cannot personally say why. But there is an unspoken agreement to assist one another... when the need arises."

"And it had arisen this night in the barn?"

"On a grand scale," Gruber said, suddenly sounding rather breathy and rough. Indeed, he sounded so breathy and rough that Helga felt that he had been getting rather too into the story for a while, and hoped vehemently that it was so. The fact that it was other men that were on his mind was largely irrelevant. She could not have him inside her tonight, but she had to have _something_ of him. A seed of dark mischief that had been sown earlier was slowly taking root, one that made her feel hot and tingly as she imagined him already standing proudly at attention. If she could not give him his pleasure directly, then perhaps she could get him to take it himself. Helga had a number of skills, but one of them was an acute understanding of what a man - any man - wanted at any given moment, and another was a big mouth.

She could use both.

Her fingers wandered down and found the hem of her skirt; lifted it to her waist, inching it over her suspenders. All of the muscles in her stomach longed for some kind of stimulation and relief. "Do you like to find a man ready for action?" she said.

"I like to enjoy the early stages."

"When his interest first becomes apparent?"

"When he begins to reveal the quality of his equipment." Gruber went silent for a time. Helga wondered how long he had had the cloth of his trousers and underwear open, and whether he was handling his bare skin. Straining her ears for confirmation and shifting uncomfortably, she slipped her hand between her own legs, cupping her sex and clamping her thighs around the ache there and the dampness at her crotch. Everything about him was exciting her tonight: the cadence of his words, the lingering scents of his cologne and cigarettes, the way they mingled with that of hot male desire. She felt herself shiver as though she were icy cold, but the truth was quite the opposite.

His voice floated out of the darkness again. "I had noticed this before, of course. I had long been aware that he had a little crush... that despite his liking for girls, he remained curious. When he wished to see what I had to offer, I was eager to be his guide."

Helga used two fingers to pull aside the swatch of her knickers, this time letting them slip underneath. This time she allowed them to graze over the bud in her sensitive mound. "Tell me what he looked like."

"With his uniform on or off?"

"Off, of course."

"He had a rear that I wanted to eat like a peach and a member that bounced up and down in a very lovely way when I was inside him."

Helga was almost forced to stuff her fist into her mouth to stifle her gasp. This was far better than she had expected. She half-wished that she had been there. Listening to him asking the other soldier if he liked it, watching his large (she felt quite certain) manhood pistoning in and out. She could hear his breathing becoming deeper, and now she was certain that he was swollen in response to his subconscious command and was caressing himself, sliding the loose sheath up and down his hardening core, alternately baring and concealing the pinker, shinier skin. She wanted him to enjoy it; to want more. She wasn't sure if she could get him to take himself over the edge, but she was more than willing to try and see.

Her mind drifted helplessly to other thoughts of him touching her, filling her with one swift, aching motion. She slid her finger up and down, nudged it inside, and burrowed into her silky wetness, shuddering silently at the pleasure that washed over her. "And before? Was he on his knees in front of you? Was he using his tongue?"

"I was using mine."

To her faint surprise, Helga's imagination did not balk at that either, although it was not something that she had considered before. It also, however, did not hesitate to conjure up another image of that tongue inside her; of him kissing the insides of her thighs before he dipped, swirling and circling, into her folds. "You wanted to take him in your mouth. Did it excite you, seeing how hard you had made him?"

There it was - the moan that she had been waiting for. Heated joy gripped her. It felt so identical and familiar to what she was used to. Perhaps a touch louder and more insistent would be nice, she thought. Gruber needed to take things up a notch or two. She wanted to make him need it as badly as she needed him. Helga lifted one hand to reach inside her blouse and cup her bosom, and spread the fingers of the other, probing back and forth and moving her palm in rhythm against her center. What would it be like to wrap her legs around him and hold on tightly while he boinked her brains out with his big, thick appendage like he had his fellow soldier?

She kept talking, with some difficulty, pushing him to do more. "He had been thinking about you for a very long time, had he not? And you are thinking about him again now. The look on his face. The taste of him." He was clearly stroking enthusiastically now, an increasingly viscous sound that made her feel dizzy with lust. "You want to push yourself inside him. You are both so hard and wet."

There was a infinitesimally small pause, and then she heard the hay bales creak as his moans returned. "You want to bend him over with your trousers around your ankles," she said, "while you listen to all of the other men around you taking their pleasure."

Helga had never satisfied herself quite by these methods before, but from some distant viewpoint, she was fascinated by her ability to be excited by another's excitation, the sound of Gruber's breathing, the thought of the stiffness and throbbing of his organ. She listened to him panting, groaning, moving; nudged and rubbed herself up and down, intensifying her pace, trying to match him. The more she stroked herself, the more she thought about what he was doing, and what she desperately wanted him to do. Even the air around them felt thick now, musky with the rising scent of arousal.

She could hear the change when he started to pant more urgently with the approach of satisfaction. The next push of her own hand brought complete combustion. In the space of a moment, release gripped her, her walls spasming around her fingers and little starbursts erupting in the back of her brain. Unable to swallow her soft, fierce sob of pleasure, she positively knew that he must have been able to hear it, and so she could hardly believe either her ears or her luck when he opted to keep going.

When she finally heard him climax, his hand skilfully taking him to the precipice and over with a series of short strokes counted out by his harsher gasps and grunts, Helga very nearly followed suit a second time.

She was not sure whether even Herr Flick had ever managed to make her do that.

The sight that greeted her when she opened her eyes was mundane. The barn was still old and dusty, and the night now starting to turn cool. The hay beneath her was scratchy now that she was able to be fully aware of it again. There would have been nothing to say that she and Gruber had just been assisting one another's vision of erotic fulfillment, had she not heard him clear his throat rather awkwardly, and a rustle on his side of the tarp as though he were cleaning himself. Through the lingering tingles of sensation as she straightened her clothes, she wondered idly whether he had taken everything off before he started, or whether his uniform was now in an even worse condition, and exactly how he was going to explain it to the General.

If Helga were not a little sympathetic to that, she might have been, at present, rather smug.

"What was his name?" she asked.

"That I will not divulge."

"Clarence, your driver, also served with you at the Russian Front, did he not?"

"I do not think there should be any more stories tonight," she heard Gruber say into the darkness.

"You have shown me quite a different side of you, Lieutenant. I did not imagine that you would still be able to rise so enthusiastically to the occasion when in the company of a woman."

"If the gun is aimed correctly, one can still usually score a bullseye regardless of who is driving the tank."

"You are being somewhat evasive."

"And you have been very talkative. But if I have to listen, the least that I can do is make the most of the topic in hand. And I do not seem to recall any objections to the outcome on your own part."

Helga felt the corners of her mouth lift into a small, secretive smile as she sank a little into her hay nest. She stretched, languidly, in still-warm memory. She was excellent at reading the most blank of poker faces, and she had furthermore never met a man who would turn down the opportunity of either mutual or solo sexual enjoyment by any means that were made available to him. Tonight, admittedly, did not constitute any kind of real and definitive proof of this, but she would just have to do her utmost to repeat the experiment.


End file.
